The Day the Universe Changed - James Burke [111]
The most wide-ranging analysis was prepared by William Chadwick, who had been secretary to the great reformer Jeremy Bentham. After the riots of 1834, the Poor Law Commissioners asked Chadwick to examine the need for legislative reform. Chadwick began by alienating the poor with a new organisation, known as the Union, which brought together all facilities provided by the local authorities into a central, combined workhouse, asylum and orphanage. Although the new Union gave too much power to the hated masters and matrons of the institutions, it provided a more easily managed structure.
In 1836 the General Register Office was established to collect data, compulsorily provided, on births, marriages and deaths, which would be presented to Parliament in an annual abstract. The Controller of these abstracts was William Farr, the statistician son of a poor Shropshire farmer, who had studied at the Paris medical school. Farr was to bring his considerable faith in numbers to the aid of the reformers and leave an indelible mark on modern Western life. ‘There is a certain relation,’he said, ‘between the value of life and the care bestowed on its preservation.’Like many of his Newtonian contemporaries, Farr looked for ‘laws’that governed life. He was convinced that, just as planets and chemical reactions obeyed ineluctable laws, so life and death also followed regular patterns. His experience in compiling actuarial tables for insurance companies led him to note that there appeared to be numerical continuity in the age of death under given conditions from one generation to another.
Observation proves that generations succeed each other, develop their energies, are afflicted with sickness, and waste in the procession of their life, according to fixed laws; that the mortality and sickness… are constant in the same circumstances … varying as the causes favourable or unfavourable to health preponderate.
A workhouse in London. Children mixed with criminals, destitute mothers with prostitutes, old people with violent drunkards. Many preferred the alternative of starvation to life in such an institution.
It was this regularity in life which gave statistics their power. To discover the laws of life would be to discover the power of social manipulation for the common good. Farr studied the national birth rates, fertility rates and death rates to see whether diseases affected the population in particular localities, when they were endemic and when they extended over entire countries as epidemics, and whether they spread through contagion or arose sporadically through existing causes which had been exacerbated by, for instance, weather or famine.
While Farr prepared his tables, Chadwick conducted the first major inquiry into the environmental circumstances in which Farr would find his diseases at work. Chadwick’s report, ‘The Sanitary Conditions of the Labouring Population of Great Britain’, was published in 1842 and shocked the complacent middle-class British to the core. Based on data from 553 districts throughout the country, it showed conditions to be worse than anyone had imagined. Street by street, town by town, with the aid of description, statistics, illustrations and maps, it revealed the incredible extent of disease, infection, child deaths, widowhood, orphanhood.
The report proved beyond doubt that bad sanitation, polluted water supplies and filth shortened life-expectancy by at least a decade; that thousands of children were on the streets, begging or living as prostitutes;